Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [9]
The haze that hung over our surroundings was unearthly. It swirled in gray and brown and yellow plumes. It suggested that not far away, something catastrophic had occurred—a volcanic eruption, a meteor strike, a thermonuclear bomb—and now life had been reduced to a state of grim survival. But this was China, not the slopes of Mount Saint Helens. This was Beijing, not Hiroshima. Under a grim, eternal twilight of a sky, I followed the unarguable dictates of a skinny teenage boy in an olive uniform and slowly shuffled forth toward the taxi line.
Lining up in China, I soon discovered, was played as a contact sport. Men and women, young and old, cigarettes dangling from their lips, used their elbows and shoulders to muscle their way to the cabs. With knobby elbows in my ribs, strange hands on my arms, and my back feeling the amassing weight of the hundreds who had not yet slinked ahead of me, I began to ponder the idea of personal space, and whether the Chinese have a character for personal space, and after being shimmied aside by a grandmother who could not have been more than three and a half feet tall, concluded that no, such a concept is evidently alien to the Chinese. And so I, too, began to dig in against the line hoppers, flinging my shoulders to contest the passage of three businessmen behind me. A shoulder here, a foot there, soon I was moving like a heaving linebacker. Some fifty people had managed to bypass me in the scrum, but now that I knew that lining up and getting bruised were intertwined, I was determined not to let this troika of businessmen pass me by. If I hadn’t begun to regard the queue as a forum for physical sport, it is quite likely that I would still be there today, for lining up in China is not for the meek.
Finally, I was directed toward a small green taxi. I had printed out the name and address of my hotel in Chinese characters before I left and now I handed it to the driver. Inside, he offered me a cigarette.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m reformed.” Though why bother not smoking in China, I wondered, as I again noted the dull gray haze stained with soot and sand from the encroaching Gobi Desert, which was a mere fifty miles away. I indicated that I didn’t mind if he smoked, and soon, as the driver approached what I was pleased to learn from a passing sign was called a carriageway, I relaxed. Carriageway suggested an idyllic ramble through a thicket of woods. And while I was reasonably certain that the drive from the airport to the center of the city would not be an idyllic ramble, my addled brain was nevertheless wholly unprepared for the mayhem that is highway driving in Beijing.
Elsewhere in the world, a four-lane highway suggests that no more than four vehicles can move forth side by side. Yet somehow, in China, seven cars manage to share a space designed for four. There was an unforgiving frenzy to get ahead. We leapt forth, swerved, smited competitors for position, and in leaps and fits made our way into the city. The taxi driver drove without consulting his mirrors, and often, far too often, we’d swerve into another lane, sending cars screeching and swaying in every direction, and as my heart palpitations threatened to turn into a full-on cardiac event, the driver calmly sipped tea from his thermos, smoked his cigarettes, and unleashed the clamor of his horn. Chinese drivers, I was discovering, speak with their horns. They blast it when they’re about to pass someone. They blast it while they’re passing. And they blast it when they’re done passing. Then they blast it some more, just because. Then there are the other horn blasts, the short ones that convey mild irritation, and the long Munchian screams that reflect a troubled soul. Together, the blasting horns converge into one endless sonic wail. We tolerated no other car, until a black Audi A6 with tinted windows rocketed behind us, flashing ominous blue lights and a panic-inducing siren. Swiftly,